Anti-vax Sentiment On Display At CDC Vaccine Panel
The meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices concluded with a vote to validate an unsupported anti-vaccine narrative.
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
Expectations were low Wednesday heading into the first meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The body, which makes vaccine recommendations to the CDC, had recently been reshaped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., a long-time anti-vaccine activist. Earlier this month, Kennedy replaced all 17 ACIP members with eight of his contrarian allies. Important Context and the Center for Media and Democracy published a deep-dive rundown of the new members last week.
The shake-up sparked outrage and dissension—even within the GOP. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who voted to confirm Kennedy, noted that many of the new appointees did “not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology” and that some lacked “experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them.” On X, he called for the ACIP meeting to “be delayed until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation—as required by law—including those with more direct relevant expertise.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics announced that its liaisons would not participate in the proceedings and even one of Kennedy’s ACIP picks, former professor of obstetrics and gynecology Michael Ross, withdrew from the panel. But the meeting was not postponed, and it played out exactly as many in public health feared it would. The newly formed panel heard from qualified CDC experts about the science and epidemiology behind certain vaccines and diseases and took turns seemingly trying to poke holes in the research—all while promoting long-discredited talking points and anti-vax narratives.
The tone of the meeting was set out of the gate on Wednesday by chairman Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician who previously worked at the anti-vax Brownstone Institute and co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for a COVID mass infection herd immunity strategy.
“If you have questions and concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, we want to hear them…No questions should be off limits,” he said.
Any doubt as to what Kulldorff might have meant was quickly laid to rest when he approvingly quoted Kennedy’s defense of his anti-vax views.
“As Secretary Kennedy has eloquently stated, ‘opposing mercury in fish does not make you anti-fish, and opposing mercury in vaccines does not make you anti-vaccine,’” Kulldorff said. “In fact, to thoroughly scrutinize and ensure the safety and efficacy of vaccines is a pro-vaccine position.” The remark was a reference to the organomercury compound thimerosal, which is used as a preservative in some vaccines, including some flu vaccines, but has largely been removed from inoculations for decades. No evidence suggests it is dangerous.
Kulldorff then compared adverse vaccine reactions and safety concerns about vaccines to airplane crashes stating,”If one airline ignores safety concerns or has a plane crash, that affects the public trust and willingness to travel with all other airlines—the same is true for vaccines.”
“Where there are unexpected adverse reactions or when cut-cornering [sic] concerning the safety of one vaccine, that affects all other vaccines reducing vaccine uptake and coverage,” he said.
Kulldorff cited “the inflated promises about the COVID vaccines preventing transmission and disease and COVID vaccine mandates,” which he claimed “have decreased overall public trust in vaccines.” During ACIP’s obligatory introductions for the new members, the chairman took another dig at the mRNA vaccines, explaining that his former employer, Harvard Medical School, had fired him over his refusal to get vaccinated against COVID despite his “superior immunity” from prior infection.
Research has shown that vaccine-acquired immunity is far more reliable, and safer, than infection-acquired immunity while hybrid immunity is the strongest overall.
It wasn’t just the COVID vaccine Kulldorff cast doubt on. The ACIP chairman also announced the formation of a working group to reevaluate the childhood vaccine schedule and long-approved inoculations. The group, he said, would study the “interaction effects between different vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients and the relative timing of different vaccines.” In particular, he singled out the hepatitis B vaccine, questioning whether it ought to be universally recommended for newborns on the false premise that the disease was really only transmitted through sexual activity and intravenous needles.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, a longtime collaborator of Kulldorff’s, has also suggested that the hepatitis B vaccine is not necessary for infants. Kulldorff also suggested the MMR vaccine be kept separate from the varicella vaccine.
The chairman was hardly the only ACIP member promoting false narratives about vaccines Wednesday. Following a presentation on COVID hospitalizations by epidemiologist Adam MacNeil of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, ACIP member Cody Meissner, a physician and signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration who has long opposed vaccinating or masking children against the disease, suggested that perhaps the presenter’s numbers were incorrect on the grounds that many people were hospitalized “with” COVID as opposed to “from” the disease.
Highlighting the distinction became a popular talking point among COVID contrarians and minimizers at the height of the pandemic.
”You refer to the COVID hospitalization rate in numerous slides, and I assume the COVID hospitalization rate refers to a hospitalized person who has a positive RT-PCR assay for COVID. And that doesn’t mean a person is hospitalized because of COVID. It’s a patient who is hospitalized with COVID in the pharynx—and those are two very different things,” Meissner said, noting a study out of Massachusetts. “I think that many of the numbers that have been presented may not really reflect COVID hospitalization.”
An expert on the COVID-NET data, however, corrected him, explaining that the issue of causality was, in fact, accounted for. Meissner’s “only response” was to note that the severity of COVID infections had decreased over time and to then ask the same question about causality about deaths.
“How many simply had a positive throat swab because many hospitals have required a throat swab on anybody who’s admitted and that’s classified as SARS infection?” he asked.
Again, his question was shot down. The expert noted that most hospitals had long since stopped screening all new admissions for COVID. Meissner then appeared to misinterpret CDC hospitalization rate data for children, confusing the extremely low weekly rate with the cumulative rate, which was significantly higher. Another presenter would later point out his mistake.
ACIP member Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has called for suspending mRNA vaccinations altogether, questioned the methodology of the research, asking if the CDC researchers had considered if maybe the vaccine did not work after all. He said that the data seemed to show that the vaccinated were overrepresented among the hospitalized.
“Did we kind of scrutinize what are alternative explanations to the analyses [sic] that was conducted about the efficacy that might not point to an efficacy of the vaccine but maybe to a different direction?” he asked.
The first author of the study responded, pointing out that Levi had misinterpreted the data and methodology of the research, adding ”We think that the controls here are exactly what we’d want to understand the relative impact of the vaccine.”
Up next was the representative for the Food and Drug Administration, Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine doctor who has spent years casting doubt on the vaccines and other COVID mitigation measures with dubious research papers. Høeg also questioned the research design, expressing her desire to see randomized controlled trials—a popular demand from contrarians and anti-vaxxers.
”If the goal is to really have comparable groups with comparable symptoms—one that happens to test positive for COVID and one that doesn’t—why exclude the patients that test positive for influenza and then those over 60 who test positive for RSV?” Høeg asked. “And are we not concerned that these may be fundamentally different groups of people that are seeking medical care but happen to test positive for COVID-19 versus something else and it’s really difficult to say their symptoms are exactly comparable?”
“I think I share a lot of people on this panel’s desire to see randomized controlled trials to minimize these types of bias so we aren’t’ sitting here wondering ‘are we being misled by this data?’” Høeg added.
The study author, however, explained that including controls or cases who test positive for another vaccine preventable disease would actually add bias to the study, noting there was “quite a lot of published literature” on the topic. The expert explained that vaccine status is highly correlated for preventable diseases like flu and COVID. MacNeil added randomized clinical trials would not allow for the timely collection of reliable real-world data.
Following an extensive presentation on mRNA vaccine safety by vaccine safety expert Sarah Meyer, a medical officer at the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Levi suggested that the CDC needed to reevaluate the way it studied vaccine safety in the face of mRNA technology on the grounds that spike protein remained in the body for years—another anti-vax talking point.
“It seems to me that that could challenge the sensitivity of most of our traditional approaches and maybe we need to adapt somewhat broader set of approaches,” he said.
Robert Malone, the notorious anti-vaccine doctor who has claimed the mRNA vaccines give people a form of AIDS and have killed millions, joined in stating that the mRNA vaccines were “significantly different from traditional vaccines.”
“We’re aligned on that?” he asked Meyer, seemingly rhetorically, before launching into a diatribe about the supposed immunologic risks of vaccination, including those with allegedly delayed onset.
”We started vaccination back in December 2020 so we have several years now—we are continuing to monitor in a very robust way to capture any and all adverse events even if they’re cumulative over years from different doses,” Meyer said. “If we were seeing any effects on organ systems or safety concerns of any kind, we would be well-equipped to pick those up in our safety systems.”
Meyer then passed on the questions to a CDC immunologist who addressed the claims about residual spike protein from the vaccines.
The final presentation on COVID vaccines dealt with coverage and revealed significant gaps in the population. Meissner asked at what point “the reception of a vaccine” ought to inform ACIP’s recommendations, declaring “I think it does need to be considered at some point.”
Kulldorff agreed, calling Meissner’s question “very important” and noting that “there has been a recommendation in place, vaccinating children, and the fact that it’s so low is a reflection of the lack of trust many parents have with the COVID vaccine recommendations that the ACIP has been giving.”
The panel also appeared skeptical following a presentation on RSV vaccines. Levi said he wanted to know more about “what babies are benefitting from this the most—pre-term babies, babies with co-morbidities compared to healthy babes—to see if there is any difference in the benefit of these products.”
Another thing Levi wanted more information about were hospitalizations. “Hospitalization is definitely a bad outcome for babies—for everybody—but not all hospitalizations are made the same,” he said. “So some hospitalizations are longer, some of them require more intense care.” He said this extra information would paint a better picture of the “overall benefit in a more nuanced way.”
At Thursday’s meeting, it seemed that anti-vaccine sentiment might not dominate the day—at least, not at first. Early on, there was a vote to recommend a new RSV vaccine from Merck for infants and then also to include it in the Vaccines for Children program that assists low-income parents. Voting against the recommendation were Levi and Vicky Pebsworth, a registered nurse with a PhD who serves as a regional director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses and has affiliated with the anti-vaccine National Vaccine Information Center.
But then ACIP heard from nurse practitioner Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Kennedy’s anti-vax group, Children’s Health Defense, who has reportedly been hired by the secretary for a role in HHS. Redwood gave a presentation on thimerosal. The presentation had been published days earlier on the CDC website and featured a slide that cited a nonexistent study to support its claims about the compound’s safety. A new version of the presentation was subsequently uploaded without the offending slide.
Most of the ACIP panelists took turns agreeing with Redwood. Most supportive was Kulldorff, who defended her from public criticism, calling her “very knowledgeable about vaccines.” Kulldorff made the case that because mercury is a toxin that people are exposed to through multiple sources throughout their lives, so thimerosal in vaccines might pose a cumulative exposure risk.
“If we care about public health we should try to minimize exposure to mercury,” he said.
After a brutal public comment period, during which many callers urged the body to follow evidence-based science and not limit access to vaccines, ACIP voted to recommend that Americans receive seasonal flu vaccines only without thimerosal. Meissner was the only “no” vote on the grounds that doing so could limit access to vaccines. Pebsworth abstained.
After the votes, Meissner criticized the decision by the American Academy of Pediatrics to boycott the meeting, stating he suspected it had done so to avoid defending some of its decisions.”
”I’m led to think that they didn’t want to come because they didn’t want to have to support some of their decisions that are difficult to do, but in the future, I strongly recommend the American Academy of Pediatrics to participate in these meetings as they always have,” he said.